I have endeavored to set before you some of the practical results of
Emerson's visions and intuitions, because, though quite unfit to expound
his philosophical views, I am capable of appreciating some of the many
instances in which his words have come true in the practical experience
of my own generation. My own work has been a contribution to the
prosaic, concrete work of building, brick by brick, the new walls of old
American institutions of education. As a young man I found the writings
of Emerson unattractive, and not seldom unintelligible. I was concerned
with physical science, and with routine teaching and discipline; and
Emerson's thinking seemed to me speculative and visionary. In regard to
religious belief, I was brought up in the old-fashioned Unitarian
conservatism of Boston, which was rudely shocked by Emerson's excursions
beyond its well-fenced precincts. But when I had got at what proved to
be my lifework for education, I discovered in Emerson's poems and essays
all the fundamental motives and principles of my own hourly struggle
against educational routine and tradition, and against the prevailing
notions of discipline for the young; so when I was asked to speak to you
to-night about him, although I realized my unfitness in many respects
for such a function, I could not refuse the opportunity to point out how
many of the sober, practical undertakings of to-day had been anticipated
in all their principles by this solitary, shrewd, independent thinker,
who, in an inconsecutive and almost ejaculatory way, wrought out many
sentences and verses which will travel far down the generations.

I was also interested in studying in this example the quality of
prophets in general. We know a good deal about the intellectual
ancestors and inspirers of Emerson; and we are sure that he drank deep
at many springs of idealism and poetry. Plato, Confucius, Shakespeare,
and Milton were of his teachers; Oken, Lamarck, and Lyell lent him their